italics

An absorbing and Baffling way of writing, I've noticed, is the stuff you read from the eighteenth Century, when you can get it unedited and in its original form as Published. They seem to italicize words randomly. I used to think Nouns were the only things they'd italicize, and also Capitalize, but nope: there seems to be no pattern to it, Grammatically Speaking. Those of us who read the King James Bible growing up, did accustom ourselves to italicized minor words in sentences, because, as some may not realize, that reflects the addition of something that is not in the languages of origin, namely either Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. Which I always thought a funny thing to do, because the whole text, after all, is a translation. Why bother to reflect some arcane grammatical element of it, when entire sentence structures are completely changed? I always laughed when people read aloud from, say, the Scofield Bible, of which I had my Grandfather's old copy, and tried to stress words in italics. Always made for strange Readings. But eighteenth century stuff is different. All those documents by our Country's Founders, for instance. Sometimes you can tell it's for Stress, but often it seems as if you were reading some kind of code or cipher. Interestingly enough, Francis Bacon complained loudly about such Irregularities, back in the 1600s. He wrote a superb pamphlet, Concerning Typography, in which he suggests a standardized system. It didn't catch on, though, till the early 1800s. Baffling!